A critical review of local and world news. This blog originally commented on the Moncton Times and Transcript but has enlarged its scope.

Saturday, December 26, 2015

Dec. 26:This is very long but,.....

...blessedly, only a tiny bit is about the Irving press.

The Dec. 24 and 26
issues of the Irving press have only one item, whether news or
commentary, worth reading. It's a commentary on our economic
situation by Geoff Martin, a professor at Mount Allison. It's in the
issue for Dec. 26, and it's on A 13. Professor Martin is the only
person I've seen in the Irving press who is familiar with any
economic thinking later than 1920. He's also a member of NB
Prosperity Not Austerity Committee.

Austerity makes
recessions worse, far worse, not better. That was the great lesson of
the 1930s.

By contrast, I found
two items, a column and a news story in the Dec. 24 edition that were
on the same topic, but backward and even obnoxious.

One was a news story
about The Canadian Taxpayers Federation, a gang of grinches who want
to fire and/or reduce the pay of civil servants and, probably,
teachers in order to balance the budget. The other, sounding the same
note was, surprisingly, Alec Bruce.

I note that neither
of the above had a word to say about the immense salaries and bonuses
paid to senior executives in private business. Even boards of
directors can get huge bonuses just by going to four meetings a year,
and nodding their heads. You think that's okay because it's their
money? It isn't. We pay the cost of those salaries, whether it's by
taxes or higher prices for the goods we buy. We also have to pay the
taxes that they can avoid.

I don't think we
have begun the understand how the rich have pillaged our economies
over the last 40 years or so. When the president of Concordia
University retired in the 1960s, his pension was $5,000 a year –
about half the starting salary of a new professor of that time.

But universities,
guided by a board of directors largely from the business world, began
treating universities as a business operation so far as presidents
and deans were concerned. When I was being courted, I was offered an
almost sinfully high salary, an interest-free mortgage, all kinds of
subsidies, and a guarantee of that high salary for life – even if I
had to be fired for incompetence.

So I thank the
Taxpayer's foundation for telling us about the high salaries of
public servants. Could they now give us a list of executive salaries
in the business world? Including the Irvings?

There is nothing
worth reading in the paper. Even the Pope's Christmas message is a
bit of a limp rag when the only terrorists he sees in this world are
on the other side; and he mourns the dead of Paris – but not the
millions we have killed or impoverished.

The Irving press
just stinks of ignorance and triviality. So let's use today for a
more general look at the world and how humans behave.

Rule by emperor in
Rome began about the same time as Christianity. From the first, the
emperors saw a need for elite troops who would be the guardians of
the emperor, and who would also act as riot police to control a city
population that was always poor, hungry and rebellious. (The other
way of controlling the people of Rome was to offer them free
entertainment of an increasingly brutal nature at the Colosseum. -
but we'll come to that part later.)

The elite troops,
usually numbering 5,000 or more, served in various trouble spots; But
some 1500 were stationed in Rome. They were called the Praetorian
Guard, the finest soldiers of the empire. Unfortunately, while they
protected the emperor from others, they did not protect him from
themselves. Early in their history, they murdered an emperor, then
announced a public auction of the emperorship, with the proceeds
going to The Praetorian Guard.

The wealthy, eager
for the glory of being emperor, bid madly; and the members of The
Guard themselves became wealthy. In fact, the auction was such a
success that The Guard routinely murdered emperors and held more
auctions.

The obvious question
is why did the wealthy continue to bid when they must have known the
danger they were putting themselves in. It's not even as though some
had a cause, something they wished to do for Rome. They didn't. And
they were, personally, already very, very wealthy. So – why?

They had money. But
now they wanted status, recognition, glory, public fawning. That's
why. And that's why Donald Trump is running for the U.S. presidency.
He has no answers to the problems the U.S. faces. That's why he
hasn't addressed any of them. The U.S. is collapsing into racial
hatreds, mass poverty, social disarray as the middle class shrinks
and as more money drifts from the poor to the very rich. Nor has he
had much to say about climate change. (And he won't – because the
U.S. has its own Praetorian Guard that would cut him off if he dared
to go there.) Building the Great Wall of Mexico isn't going to change
that. Nor will defeating ISIS change that.

The Praetorian Guard
of the U.S. is a small group of the extremely wealthy. Nobody,
including a TV upstart like Trump, is going to get past that guard.
And Trump knows it. That's why he has appointed the most fervent
agent of the extremely wealthy, a man who has been called, with
reason, a neo-Nazi, to his campaign staff. Bill Kristol has been a
major force in pushing for wars such as Vietnam and Iraq. But ,
like his boss that he advised ( George Bush), he avoided military
service himself.

He was, however, a
key advocate of the invasion of Iraq and of Afghanistan.

Kristol is a very,
very far right-winger who has spent his life serving the capitalist
Praetorian Guard of the U.S. He was highly critical of Trump, and
even threatened to start a new party for extremists like himself. But
now he's a major figure on Trump's campaign staff. So Trump has made
his peace with those who are bigger billionaires than he is. So have
most of the others in the running for the presidency, including –
especially including – Hilary Clinton.

That's why all but
one of them has had nothing of substance to say about the severe
domestic and social crises facing the U.S. That one exception is
Bernie Sanders who is the only one not owned by The Praetorian Guard.
He is the only one who raised issues that have to be discussed.

So, if Trump has
nothing to say, why is he running? His ego needs stroking. He needs
to be admired, even worshipped. He needs to be the emperor. He got
his first taste of glory with the TV show, 'The Apprentice'. He needs
more. And he's making the only kind of speeches he knows how to make
– as the tough boss on 'The Apprentice'.

The U.S. is in very great danger. Democracy has collapsed. And the
American Empire is collapsing. And we live next door.

Then there's
terrorism.

Terrorism is
scarcely unusual. The U.S. killed millions, most of them civilians,
in Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan. It kills more than we
ever hear about with drones in countries all over the world. The U.S.
is, and has been, the greatest creator of terror in the world for
over 50 years. Now, we know there are millions of Americans, most by
far, who wouldn't dream of killing helpless civilians and babies. So
why do they kill so many all over the world? That bring us to a
couple of things to understand, here, about human, group behaviour.

When people feel
that their society is under threat, they turn to some institution
remaining which is unquestionably theirs

New France, before
the British conquest, was Roman Catholic – but no more so than it
is today (which isn't much). But, as the British moved into positions
of wealth and power, the French leadership went back to France. The
people of New France were abandoned – and frightened. So they
turned to the only social institution they had left – the Roman
Catholic church. Within little more than a generation, moderately
religious Quebec had become so devoutly Catholic that the church
controlled hospitals, education, orphanages, even government. Almost
all teachers in the French schools were nuns or priests. Until the
1960s, no bill was passed in the assembly until it received the
approval of the Bishops. In the whole history of Quebec, there has
been only one, Protestant premier.

The small,
Protestant mission church I attended and the small, Protestant school
were routinely stoned, and their windows smashed in our
overwhelmingly Catholic district. I was there, once, when the
Catholic priest shrugged his shoulders and said, “It's only a
Protestant church.”

I don't write any of
this with bitterness. I can well believe Protestant districts behaved
as badly. That's the way humans behave. In a time of social fears,
they turn to an institution which is theirs, commonly a religious
institution. They become extreme in their devotion to that religion,
and extreme in their treatment of other faiths.

All of that becomes
reinforced by a mythical history. Children in Quebec were taught that
virtually all the leadership of New France came from the churches,
and the people spent virtually all their time in prayer. In fact,
the colony was always desperately short of clergy, and the people
were not notably church-goers, and they were notoriously slow to pay
church dues. Even the Bishop commonly spent most of his time in
France.

With a combination
of religious fervour and mythical history, people invent a culture
which, in fact, never existed. That became obvious in Quebec from the
1970s on as church power in Quebec collapsed to be replaced, in large
measure, by the separatism of the parti Quebecois. That created a
terrible problem for the separatists because many, perhaps most, had
abandoned the church. But they needed a culture, one that justified
and made necessary separation. So there was a fever to define Quebec
culture.

But almost
everything in Quebec had, for well over two hundred years, been
attached to the church – and that was now unacceptable. And, so,
despite decades of research, Quebec separatists have been unable to
define the culture that they are struggling to defend.

When Poland was
overwhelmed and controlled by the Soviet Union after World War 2, it
turned to the church, just as Quebec had at the conquest. And it was
church-centred groups that led to the revolt against the Soviets. In
the same way, many Latin Americans have turned to the Roman Catholic
church in their struggle against U.S. domination.

There is nothing
unusual in the religious extremism of ISIS. Such extremism was
prominent in Canada and the U.S. as justification for the destruction
of native peoples. And God was commonly dragged into both world wars
to fight on our side. (The same God was also invoked German leaders,
including Hitler.)

When a society is
frightened, it commonly turns to its perceived religion and to its
(mythical) history, and uses them for support.

The United States,
which is very frightened, is taking comfort in myths about the
Puritans (who were NOT kind to native peoples) and about the civil
war (which was NOT fought to free slaves). The U.S. and Canada both
kid themselves that they are Christian societies – and this helps
us to ignore the murders of millions of innocent people who are not
Christians. No. That's not terrorism. That's doing God's work. But,
oh, those muslims (who have killed fewer Americans than American
police have), they're just evil.

Much of this
occurred to me as I caught 20 minutes or so of a Christmas season
movie about Jesus. The scene I saw was “The sermon on the mount.”
You can check it out at

The meek shall
inherit the earth? Come off it. The people who run our countries are
not meek. Nor do they do any favours for the meek. We shall not kill?
The American war industry is by far the biggest in the world. We
should love our enemies? Really? Dropping bombs seems a funny way to
show love. We shall love our neighbour? Oh, yeah. We give our
hungry neighbours each a turkey - once a year. We love them so much
we make them work for ten bucks an hour. (New Brunswick, by the
way, is the worst province in Canada for charitable donations. Funny
how the Irving press never gives that impression.)

Our economic system
is built on pure greed (which we politely call 'competition'). It's a
system that makes the rich and powerful richer by taking from the
poor across Canada, and with corporations that exploit and impoverish
people around the world – as so many mining companies do.

There is scarcely a
trace of religious impulse in any of our political parties. (The
old, CCF party was profoundly based on religious beliefs. But the
modern NDP has lost much of that. The Liberals and Conservatives
never had any.)

We kill people by the millions to please the wealthy - like oil
barons. But the myths of our history and our religion make it okay
for us to kill innocent people. We do it to defend freedom – which
we have rarely allowed anybody to have; and we only kill people who
are evil – like the Vietnamese and Muslim and Guatemalan children
whom we bombed and burned to death. But when Muslims kill, that's
because they're religions are evil. So it's okay to kill back.

In short, us humans
react largely by animal instincts. We don't think. And our reactions
are often based simply on emotions and the myths in which we were
raised.

Thus, a very wealthy
person may skimp on taxes and make money out of low salaries and lack
of employment benefits. But it he gives a little bit of his wealth
away (tax deductible), we call him a philanthropist and a model of
Christian love.

We accept the values
and ideas of those around us without thought. That's because us
humans want to be liked and accepted. But we're scared of people who
look different from us, dress differently, or have a different
religion.

We say this is a
Christian society. But I don't see much that is Christian about it –
not even in the churches.

We have whole
families that have never voted anything but Liberal (or Conservative)
in the whole, family history.

We say,
automatically, every Nov. 11, that Canadians died to bring democracy
and equality to the world. Would you care to write down a list of the
countries we 'gave' democracy and equality to? - China? Haiti? Cuba?
Guatemala? Malaya? Kenya? Congo? Palestine? French Indo-China?
Egypt? I could write a very long list of countries we did NOT give
freedom to. And I would include India because Britain was forced to
give it independence.

But that's the way
us humans are. We don't think. We don't think because we're scared to
think. And we don't think because we're not trained to think. We are
not trained to think in our public schools because parents would
raise hell if we were. We are poorly trained to think even in our
universities because professors like to talk about thinking, but
don't know much about how to teach it. Worse, some programmes like
Business Administration, have little connection with thinking.

We don't think
because we have news media that deliberately feed us with trivia and
propaganda. They exist to discourage thinking. And it's not an
accident that almost all news media are owned by very wealthy people.
They want us to be ignorant. They don't want us to think.

That might be
acceptable if the very wealthy were great thinkers. Alas! I see no
evidence they think at all. They don't seem to. They just want. They
have inflicted enormous suffering on the world because they want its
oil and its mines and its lands. These are the people who have
brought all of us to the edge of the greatest war.

I used to think they
were immoral, and just didn't give a damn for anyone but themselves.
But the story I wrote about some days ago – the one about how the
major oil companies knew the causes and the dangers of climate change
almost forty years ago, about how they kept it secret, about how they
mounted propaganda campaigns when the news did get out – campaigns
to way it wasn't happening – changed my mind. They're not immoral.
They're just greedy and too stupid to realize that any damage done to
us is done the them, too.

I can't pretend to
have any magic formula, whether capitalist or socialist whether
democratic or elitist, which we should follow. Any political or
economic system I have ever heard of breaks down if we just conform
and react. No. We have to think. We have to talk. And, above all, we
have to learn to think. I suspect that almost any economic or
political system will work if we think. I know that none will work if
we don't think.

And, my, it would be
nice to see the Christian churches learn to think.

Finally, we have the
question of what it is that puts us into such a stupor that we won't
think. They just sit back with a glazed look. Partly, it's our fear
of seeming to be difference from other people, our yearning to be
accepted. But it's more than that.

The Romans used the
Coliseum to induce stupor, and encourage reaction rather than
thinking. It went so far from thinking, that those performing didn't
need any skill at all. Pure brutality carried the day. Many of the
performers just had to be able to sit there while being clawed and
chewed to death by lions.

Now think of the
corny brutality of professional wrestling and “martial arts”
fighting. To follow boxing or football or hockey requires at least
some understanding of what's going on. But pro wrestling and “martial
arts” fighting demand that one have no brain at all. And sheer
brutality is especially gripping if it is carried out by women.

Film has become much
the same. It's market is increasingly made up of films that have no
connection with reality. Last night, I briefly watched a western.
Typically, it was a shoot 'em up western, the story of a west that
never, really existed. In a typical scene, two gangs, hiding behind
rocks were shooting at each other with Colt. 45 revolvers. The
distance between them was a good hundred metres, and they were
shooting from the hip. Anyone who has used a revolver will
understand the idiocy of all that. Even if they had taken the time to
aim, any hit would have been pure luck.

Films that examine
real life are getting fewer. The trend is to escapism – escape from
this world, escape from thinking. In our escape world, we just react.
That's why people who go to war and kill are automatically heroes (if
they're on our side. If they're on the other side, they're
terrorists.)

Star Wars is the
ultimate escape from reality and from any need to understand reality.

Fifty years ago,
Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan burst on the world with his
analyses of media – radio, TV, film. (He would now have to include
computers and cell phones.)

Radio was a very
effective means of encouraging thinking. That's because listeners had
to imagine the appearance of the speaker, and had to become involved
with him or her. In years of radio, I had many reminders of that.
People who heard me talking to a friend while walking along the
street would recognize my voice and, frequently, were convinced I
knew them because through my voice I had been in their home every
day. And I knew Uncle Paul who wasn't feeling well. They remembered
things I had talked about, and wanted to discuss them with me. Radio
encouraged thinking.

(That kind of radio
is disappearing, though, as radio simply becomes an endless
repetition of the top 100 songs.)

Something like the
radio connection with thinking used to happen with films such as “How
Green was My Valley”, “ Citizen Kane”, or “The Seventh
Seal” by Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. But that's rare in
modern film.

TV, from the start,
has been a 'cold medium'. People watch it in a sort of stupor. That's
why camera angles on TV change every 20 seconds or so. My own
experience of TV was that people really don't think about much while
watching it. They are more likely to notice on TV that your necktie
is crooked than to remember anything that is said.

And that brings us
to computers and cell phones. Watch any group of teenagers sitting
around in your living room, or walking through a park or even eating
together at a birthday party. Chances are they'll all be playing
games on miniature computers. There is almost no human interchange.
And no thinking.

Increasingly, we are
growing up with no capacity for thinking. In its place, we simply
react.

Does Moncton need a
hundred million dollar 'events centre'? Well, that takes some
thinking. For a start, what are Moncton's priorities of needs? Will
some important needs be lost to us if we spend a hundred million on a
hockey rink?

But I haven't seen
any thinking from our politicians or news media. They just react.
“Yeah. It'll be good for tourism.” Actually, I haven't seen any
credible reports that it will be a hundred million dollars worth of
good for tourism. Nor have I seen a list of priorities for the needs
of this city. There has been no thinking, just reaction. The closest
to thinking I have seen is the obvious decision that having a new
hockey rink is more important than education and more important than
a skilled civil service, more important than food for the hungry and
more important than shelter for the homeless. Onward, Christian
soldiers.

And the cultural
development of a society? New Brunswick will happily spend money for
a singer who sings through his nose while playing guitar and jumping
into the air doing splits and wearing a costume covered in flashing
lights while fireworks go off around the stage. And that would be
sure to get ecstatic reviews in the Irving press. But, with few
exceptions, that is all the musical education that is available. So I
guess that's not a priority.

My, this has been a
long blog. The point is we are living through a process the world has
known before. We have strong similarities to ancient Rome in the
years of its decline. We are living through the same maldistribution
of wealth, the same encouragement to be trivial and unthinking, the
same greed and vanities of the very rich – and its made worse by
TV, film and computer media that discourage thinking even more.

It reminds me of a
sign I saw in a gift shop. Take what you want, it said. Take what you
want; but pay for it. That sign would have been quite appropriate for
the Empire of Rome in its final days.

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About Me

born into poverty in Montreal. (1933 was a bad year to be born.) Kicked out of school in grade 11. Became factory hand, office boy.
Did a general BA, mostly at night at Sir George Williams University, and partly while a youth worker for YMCA, camps, etc. Then teacher training at McGill.
Taught gradea 7 to 11 for six years. Loved it.
Quit to do MA at Acadia, then PhD (History) at Queen's.
Taught history three years at UPEI, then some 35 years at Concordia U in Montreal.
Loved the teaching. Thought the profs had more pompous and useless asses among then than is really desirable outside a zoo.
work experience:
factory, office,social group work, office,camp director, teacher.
Radio - c. 3000 broadcasts, mostly current events.
TV - many hundred appearances, mostly commentaries.
Film - some writing, advising, voice-overs.
Writing - no count, some hundreds. Some academic, but mostly for popular market, and ranging from short stories to stories to newspaper and magazine columns to history books.
professional speaker - close to 2000.
Awards for the above? yep